Economic Beat

A Wealth of Sins to Atone For

The perma-bears get it wrong again. So do the president, the doomsayers on the sequester, and a vegetable gardener.

"This has been the fifth year in a row," comments Ed Yardeni of Yardeni Research, "that the perma-bears sinned by missing a great bull market in stocks because they were convinced that another financial crisis was imminent."

The root cause of the perma-bears' sin of omission, says Yardeni, is their inability to appreciate the adage, "Don't fight the Fed and the BOE, BOJ, and ECB"—those last-named being acronyms for, respectively, the central banks of England, Japan, and the 17 nations with the...